Categories: Link dump

Exploding boy had his weekly checkup, his first since he had his eye fixed – it was actually a freeze technique, not laser as I’d thought. 20/20 vision in the eye! Eye pressure normal! No further checks until the school holidays! A set of 6 steak knives!

He’s thoroughly over being told how lucky he is. But he is.

Girlchild finished her exams and turned seventeen. Seventeen! How did that happen? I gave her the green light to get some heels, which I’d banned because I didn’t want a kid with deformed spine and joints, and she’d submitted to this graciously. She’s been to Savers now and come back with several pairs of spiked killer heels, in which she stalks beautifully about and towers over me. I think she’s absorbed the concept, though, that they’re a Sometimes thing for parties and things, not for everyday walking about. She still loves her McBalletflats for that.

To put it into a perspective which a larger number of readers can identify with, on Saturday night many readers of LP, many readers of The Australian, no doubt a goodly number of Tasmanian forestry workers and perhaps even a few Murdoch press journos will be sitting with their eyes glued to their TV screens, Lotto tickets clutched in their nervous little hands, hoping against all odds that the tumbling numbers will visit upon them a disaster of comparable magnitude to that with which Latham was threatening Tasmanian forestry workers.

Tigtog has come up with a wonderful thing: Finally Feminism 101. Save your weary fingers and quote from this site rather than explaining the same things again and again. Get your daughters and sons to read it.

Belle Waring (who recently got my personal award for the best ever post title) posted back in March (yeah, I know) on an interesting Boston Globe article and an equally interesting response to it on Pandagon.

The gist is that as wives earn more money, they end up doing a greater and greater share of the housework, with the result that women who are the sole bread-winners often do more housework than women who pull in 50% of the family’s income.

I was keen to join in on this but there was music to be played, and of course, that meant the house went all to shit and I had to spend a lot of blogging time on housework. (/Irony).

To boost the irony content still further, check out this banner ad which was on the Globe at the time I read the article:

Then there was the mind-boggling stupidity of a Woman’s Day article on Mary’s Private Hell: That’s Mary-Aussie-oi-oi-oi Princess of Denmark Mary– apparently she’s suffered a “barrage of criticism” for sending little prince Christian to daycare. Not even full time – but apparently, as a pregnant woman with “royal duties”, she should still pretend to be a stay-at-home mum. Even though home’s a rather big place with no-one small for Christian to play with.

Never mind the fact that nothing could be better for a wee tot who’s born into the bizarro-world of any royal family than to spend some time with other kids his own age and get a bit of variety, not to mention a few normal germs. And I’d say the same for any solitary child.

Send a letter to Kevin Rudd and Tony Burke from here, if you remember the disgraceful “small target” stance Kim Beazley took on this issue and you wish for the Labor party to grow a spine and oppose it. Results not guaranteed.

(Warning: Geek material ahead. You may want to stop here.)

Now for a question for the Hivemind. I’m using WordPress and I’m trying to put a sound file on the blog. I’m clear on it in principle: Like an image, save sound file to PC (Mac in my case), upload to Media2 server, link. Simple (thanks Dogpossum). But in my case, the process doesn’t seem to be as intuitive as image linking.
For one, when I save a sound file to my Mac, it ends up as a .m4a extension, although the icon has “MPEG 4” on it. Is this right? (As you can tell, sound files aren’t something I deal with in my everyday life.)
For another, WordPress, which writes the linking HTML for you when you upload a file, has only one “upload file” interface. I don’t know whether the link HTML is different for a sound file; I assume that’s cool because WordPress could look at the file extension to see what it is. But when I go to upload a sound file, it just sits there and WordPress doesn’t seem to recognise it.

I feel a bit stupid, since a lot of my job entails talking people through things like this. I’ve seen sound files on WordPress blogs, so I know the fault is with the user. If anyone’s feeling particularly energetic and/or charitable, and they feel like emailing me a step-by-step for dummies on hsmartATiprimusDOTcomDOTau, you’ll have my eternal gratitude and grovelling admiration.